Confronting Fear
In his book A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis wrote, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” And though fear is a normal part of the experience of grief, most often grief magnifies our human capacity for fear. Eighteenth century philosopher and politician Edmund Burke wrote, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” When we grieve, fear seems to ambush us when we are unprepared to defend ourselves.
And when something as small as a microbe represents a threat to our global safety and well-being, we easily succumb to fear, anxiety and, in the worst case, a kind of subdued hysteria largely driven by irrational though very real questions such as "Am I going to die?" which are the inevitable subtext of catastrophic events.